“I often ask myself,” Frits said, “what it is that causes baldness. It’s something that occurs almost exclusively among men. While at other spots on the body, the hair just keeps on growing.”
“The roots on the scalp die off,” said Jaap. “That’s a real pearl of wisdom,” Frits said, “I knew that already. That is like saying: it will not rain, as long as it remains dry. On occasion I have thought that it comes because the skull grows larger and the skin is stretched quite tightly across it. That restricts the flow of blood. Could that be it?” Jaap said nothing.
“It goes faster all the time, doesn’t it?” Frits went on. “There is no stopping it, is there?” “I’d like to inform you,” Jaap said, running his right hand over his scalp, “that in the last month or two the hair loss has ceased. There are cases in which the hair becomes very thin, but no longer becomes any thinner: such a case am I.”
“In the long run though you go bald anyway, just like everyone else,” Frits said. “That is inevitable. Could it be,” he went on, “that it has something to do with your heart, with the blood vessels? You have a rather weak heart, don’t you?”
“To be frank,” Jaap replied, “when I climb the stairs, it goes ‘hee hee hee!’ down here.” He pointed to his left breast and made a hoarse, squeaking sound. “When that happens you do not hear it, but I do.” “Isn’t that something like high blood pressure?” Frits asked. “No,” Jaap said, “that is what you have. My blood pressure is too low.” “What exactly are the symptoms of excessively high blood pressure?” Frits asked. Looking at his watch he saw that it was nearly ten o’clock; he stood up and began pacing back and forth.
“When you bend over, you feel a tightness in your head,” said Jaap. “Yes, that’s exactly what I have,” Frits said. “Even when you tilt your head to one side, or lower your chin to your breast, it hurts: everything is stiff. Isn’t that right?” “Yes,” Frits said.
“Pressure on the eyelids is intolerable. It produces pain. When you sit too close to the window, the light hurts your eyes.”
“All that is the case with me,” said Frits. “Well, bully for you, my boy, congratulations,” Jaap said pointedly. “I’m sure you’ll tough it out this way for at least a few more years.” He grinned. Joosje poured them all more coffee.
“Still, it is precisely these things that enrich our lives,” Jaap said. “The ill and the poor in spirit. When I see a wooden leg or an old woman with a cane with a rubber tip on it, or a hunchback, it makes my day.”
They both laughed. “Or those wonderful lumps,” Frits said slowly, in a pensive tone, “those huge pink potatoes that grow on someone’s head, completely free of charge, or behind their ear, in lieu of a pencil.” He shook in his chair, so hard that the floor rattled. For a moment, both of them were out of breath. “You should try caressing a hunchback’s hump sometime,” Jaap said, coughing, “it drives them crazy.”
“You also have,” said Frits, “that fellow with the peg leg, on the bridge. He sits on the ground and blocks your way with that leg. You almost trip over it; then you have no choice but to give him something.”
“A blind man is also a wondrous thing,” said Jaap, “with one of those dogs.” He hiccupped with laughter. “Pay no attention to me,” he shrieked, “me and my dog, pay no attention to me, for I am blind.” “It is a glorious thing,” he went on. “But the loveliest of all are the ones with a face mutilated by fire. No nose and moist eyes in a socket without lids. That is truly something grand.”
“Stop it, the two of you,” Joosje said, “with that nonsense.” The doorbell rang. “What a ridiculous hour,” she said, and went to answer it. “It believe I hear more than one voice,” Frits said, when the sound of conversation in the hallway reached them.
Joosje came into the room in front of the visitors, her gaze fixed glassily on the ceiling and her lips forming a little o. Following right behind was a man of about thirty-five years with a protruding belly, accompanied by a woman with closely cropped hair. After greeting everyone, they sat down. Jaap said nothing.
“I suppose we’ve walked in on a lively conversation?” the man asked. He had, despite his spectacles, a boyish face; his dark-blond hair was parted casually on one side. A smile was frozen on the woman’s face. “We are welcome, aren’t we?” the man asked. “Joosje, are we welcome?” “Oh well, of course,” Joosje said, reddening. “Listen to this,” he said, “of all the stupidities.” He leaned over to Frits, whose chair was next to his, and said: “Allow me to rectify an omission. My name is Wortel. Arend Wortel.” Frits clasped the warm, heavy hand. “That’s it,” he thought, detecting a faint odour of gin, “he’s had a few too many.”
“We were,” the visitor continued, “at the home of a niece, a married woman. We had to go to another room and I said to a young lady: could I offer you my arm? That’s only polite, isn’t it? And do you know what she says? She says: Why would you do that, are you having trouble standing up on your own? Well, I became angry. And everyone else got angry at me. Don’t ask me why. Then I said: In that case, we shall be going. Then we shall be going. Then we thought: we’ll stop by and see Jaap. We are welcome, aren’t we, Jaap? Otherwise we shall be going.”
Jaap said nothing. The man looked around, coughed and said to Frits: “I don’t suppose I could borrow a hundred guilders from you for a month, could I? You do have sufficient liquidity, I take it?” Jaap could barely contain his laughter.
“What do you think of that?” Wortel went on, “they simply ran us out of the house, in fact. That’s the long and the short of it. And for what?” “My guess is that you went up to one of those girls and squeezed her tits,” Jaap said. “No, oh no,” said Wortel. “You were there, Nora, was it anything like that?” “Oh no,” the woman said flatly, the smile still pasted to her face.
“Are we welcome?” he asked Jaap. Jaap said nothing. “What time is it?” “It is ten past eleven,” said Frits.
“Then we shall be on our way,” Wortel said. He gestured to his companion and they disappeared quickly into the hallway, with Joosje right behind. Jaap and Frits remained seated and silent, until they heard the two descending the stairs. “Strange things are afoot,” Jaap said with a smile. Frits stood up and wished him a good night.
“And all the best with your health,” said Jaap. “Saturday evening is still on; I’m counting on it. I will stop by most probably before then. I am welcome, aren’t I?” Saying these final words, he pounded his fists against belly and chest and feinted like a boxer.
Frits picked his way down the half-darkened stairs. Arriving at the bottom, he heard Jaap call out after him: “I am welcome, aren’t I?” The voice cackled with mirth.
“In any case,” Frits said aloud, having reached the pavement, “it’s still freezing hard enough at night.” At the far end of the canal he saw that the river was covered with a layer of ice. He took off at a trot to warm his feet.
The light was on in the living room. His father was seated at the table. His eyelids were red, as though from excessive rubbing, and there was a smudge of dirt on his right cheek. He sniffed loudly now and then, to rid his nose of mucus. “Look,” he said, when Frits remained standing hesitantly in the room, “here it is.” He pointed to a passage in a book with a black binding that lay open on the table before him. “The rights accorded to the counts of Egters date from as early as 1384,” Frits read. “What is this all about?” he thought. “Very interesting, extremely interesting,” he said, “I’ll have a look at that tomorrow.” “That is not enough,” he thought. “I will examine it closely tomorrow,” he added. The radio, he heard then, was still on, for suddenly a voice said: “Our station break has come to an end. You are listening to the ‘Dr Jazz Quickstep’.”
Frits left the room. “I need to stop thinking,” he repeated to himself over and over as he brushed his teeth and undressed. He hopped into bed. “I still have those sugar cubes in my pocket,” he thought. “Now rest, a rest most complete.” Shortly afterwards he fell asleep.
He awoke to a cry, followed by a noise as of something falling over and voices. He jumped out of bed and hurried into the living room, where he turned on the light and opened the sliding doors. His father was sitting straight up in bed and looking at his mother, who was weeping, rocking back and forth and pressing her face against the pillow again and again. She had a handkerchief stuffed halfway into her mouth and was uttering little cries. “That’s something new,” Frits thought. “I’ll fetch you some water,” he said, took a glass from the sideboard and brought it back from the kitchen in a wink. At his repeated urging, his mother drank a sip. “You go on,” his father said, “your mother is having a nervous…” “He can’t remember the word for it,” Frits thought. He closed the sliding doors again and went back to bed. “These are the days given to us under the sun,” he said aloud in the darkness. Twenty minutes later he fell asleep.
“We are in the country,” a voice said. He was standing at the side of a road between pastures. After walking on a bit he came to a country estate, with a tall metal fence and a drive of white gravel. Right across from it, on the other side of the road, a huge chessboard had been set up on the verge. “They make things far too complicated,” he thought, “besides, there are no chess pieces.” The board was a good ten feet from corner to corner.
“Come over here,” a gardener shouted. Frits pushed open the heavy gate and walked up the drive. “Look,” the man said, “we are laying out all kinds of things here.” He pointed to flower beds. There was also a series of lawns, bordered by climbing ornamentals which, for lack of a wall or tree, were crawling over the grass. Upon closer examination he saw that these were not flowers at all, but cunningly woven woollen fibres, of the kind children use to weave lanyards, drawn tight as though on a loom. Then he grew afraid. He turned to run, but stepped into the herbaceous border of a lawn and his feet became entangled. Finally, he worked himself free, but heard the danger approaching: a slowly rattling, shuddering sound as though from a steamroller. He fled onto the road, but the terrible thing followed. Looking back repeatedly he saw nothing, yet knew that if he should pause to rest for a moment, it would appear around the corner. He raced into a little house, but a woman’s voice cried out: “Hold on, what have we here?” “Quiet, quiet!” he shouted. But the voice went on shrieking loudly.
Then he heard the danger rattling up off the road and heading directly for him. It burst into the house and he, in a last-ditch attempt, ran down a set of winding stairs to the cellar. He leapt, half stumbling, down the steps, but the thing behind continued its pursuit, slowly at first, then faster and rattling ever more loudly.
The further down the twisting stairs he raced, the slighter his lead became. Then he saw the cellar floor. He stumbled and fell. Everything went black. “Am I welcome?” a voice said.
He awoke, his face wet, opened his eyes and squeezed them shut again and again, then raised himself onto one elbow, sitting half upright for a few minutes, before daring to lie down once more.
IV
WHEN HE AWOKE that morning at a quarter to eight, his first thought was: “It is Christmas Day.” On the window he saw no frost flowers. “Perhaps the thaw has set in,” he thought, then rolled over and slept until eight thirty. “Don’t go on lying here for more than half an hour,” he thought when he awoke again. Yet he fell asleep once more and awoke only at twenty minutes past the hour of nine, when his mother opened the door and said: “Isn’t it about time you got up? I’m going to put on the eggs.”
He raised himself on one elbow, but lay down again and pulled the covers over his head. He breathed the bedroom smell of his body between the sheets, and thought: “Would that smell the same to anyone else?” Ten thirty came. “Now I really must get up,” he thought. At five past eleven he slid back the blankets.
After washing and shaving he took his clothes under his arm and went to dress in the warm living room. On his plate lay an egg. “It would have been better if you hadn’t boiled it already,” he said to his mother, “then I could have done it myself. Now it’s cold.”
“I had no idea you would stay in bed for so long,” she said. His father came in wearing his coat; he had a heavy shawl over his arm. “We’re going for coffee at the Geitenkoois’,” said his mother, draping the shawl over her shoulders.
Once they were gone, Frits cut the cooled egg onto four slices of bread and ate them. He cleared the table, then walked back and forth in the room for a time. The radio was playing quiet organ music. After ten minutes he turned it off and went into the side room. “Carelessness, wastefulness, stupidity,” he said as he turned off the gas fire, which was burning high.
Across the street, water was dripping from the gutter onto the pavement. “How can that be, it hasn’t even snowed,” he thought. “It’s been such a long time. I didn’t want to lend him that jumper. Now it is only going to smell of Joop, I said.” He whistled through his teeth and said to himself: “At the birthday party, now I remember. That little girl, the precocious one. I wish I were a stone, she said, then I wouldn’t have to live. It startled everyone out of their wits. She had read that somewhere, or heard it, of course.”
The doorbell rang. “God help us,” he mumbled and went to open it. “Is Frits van Egters at home?” a voice asked, stammering halfway as it spoke his name. A tall man in a grey hat came up the stairs. He had a pale, bloated face and his head seemed not so much to rest on his shoulders, as to hang in front of them. “If back and shoulders did not prove normal on closer inspection, one would say he was a crookback,” thought Frits.
“Do you have a moment?” asked the visitor, fluttering his hands nervously, “could I speak to you for a moment, Frits?” “Of course, Lande,” Frits said. “There’s no one else at home, by the way, so do come in.”
“It’s rather serious,” said the man, taking off his hat. The top of his head was masked in the middle by thin wisps of hair. “Is it convenient to talk here?” he asked, once they were sitting across from each other in the side room. “Yes, certainly,” said Frits, “I am all ears. Do tell. I have plenty of time, but first I need to know what it is about.”
“Well,” the visitor said, “didn’t you say to me once: Maurits has a criminal bent, beware of that? That is what you said, isn’t it?” “Oh, well,” said Frits, “criminal. Criminal, yes, perhaps I did say something like that.”
“The reason I’ve come to you,” said Lande, pulling out a pipe which he scraped clean with a pencil above the ashtray, “is because I need to be sure.”
“Get to the point, for God’s sake,” Frits said, “tell me first what is going on. Like a newspaper report. First a brief summary of the whole thing, then the story at length.”
“All right,” Lande said, “an hour and half ago the doorbell rang. My wife opened it. She said: It is Maurits. I thought: what’s he come for, on a Sunday morning? He had two books with him, ones I had lent him and asked about on a few occasions. I asked: did you come all this way just for that, to bring back those books? He said: No, I had to be in the neighbourhood anyway.
“I had just washed my hair and it’s always so brittle then, I use brilliantine on it. I had the little tin of brilliantine—do you use brilliantine?”
“No,” Frits said, “go on.”
“Well, I had put that tin on the stove to soften it and we both looked at it and we talked about brilliantine. I put some of it on my hair and went to wash my hands in the kitchen, because they were greasy. As I was standing there, I suddenly thought: I should let the tap run and suddenly go back into the room. But I didn’t. My wife was up in the loft. Instead I dried my hands and, as soon as the water was turned off, went back in quickly. Maurits was standing there in the room, looking a bit awkward, and I thought I saw him rummaging a bit in his coat pocket, his right pocket. And he said right away: Lande, I really must be going, I’m in a bit of a hurry. He’d been gone for less than a minute when I went to the sideboard and looked in the tin box I sometimes keep money in, money I’ve put a
side. For the last few days, two hundred-guilder notes had been lying there, beneath a notebook.”
“And now they were no longer there,” said Frits. “And what did you do then?”
“First I asked my wife about it and she was sure too, that they had been there. I had not put them in my wallet, I looked again to be sure. Then I went to his house. He wasn’t there. But his father, he was at home.”
“And what did he say?”
“I said: Duivenis, I need to talk to you alone, right now. It is serious. It is about Maurits. After I went in and told him the story, he said: I shall ask him about it, and if he did it, he will tell me.”
“I find it quite meritorious of you, to keep me informed of the facts,” said Frits. “I suppose you will now wait and see?”
“And if he tells me that it is not so,” said Lande, “what must I do then? Can I take that for a certainty? Do you think he is capable of such a thing?”
“Yes,” Frits said, “I think he is quite capable of that. I think he is capable of much more too. And I also know a great deal more.”
“What, what is it then?” asked Lande.
“I am not going to tell you. But I urge you to stick to your guns. He has that two hundred guilders and he must give it back. And should he refuse, I would definitely not hesitate to report it to the constabulary.”
Lande pulled a conical pouch from his pocket, filled his pipe from it, and lit it. “We shall see,” he said, and began buttoning his coat. “Strange things are afoot,” Frits said with a smile, “this certainly won’t do your nervous condition any good. How is it with that tightness in your jaw?”
“It had been getting better, the last few days. Do you notice anything about my manner of speech now, Frits?” “It is a bit agitated,” said Frits, “but the pronunciation is normal.”